Aaron Rinehart

Aaron Rinehart

The speed and scale of complex system operations within cloud-driven architectures make them extremely difficult for humans to mentally model their behavior. This often results in unpredictable and catastrophic outcomes that become costly when unexpected security incidents occur. There is a need to realign the actual state of operational security measures in order to maintain an acceptable level of confidence that our security actually works when we need it to.

As an alternative to simply reacting to failures, the security industry has been overlooking valuable chances to further understand and nurture ‘accidents’ or ‘mistakes’ as opportunities to proactively strengthen system resilience. Chaos Engineering allows us to proactively expose the failures, build resilient systems, and develop an "Applied Security" model to minimize the impact of failures.

Chaos Engineering allows for security teams to proactively experiment and derive new information about underlying factors that were previously unknown. This is done by developing live fire exercises that can be measured, managed, and automated. Contrary to Red/Purple Team exercises, chaos engineering does not use threat actor or adversarial tactics, techniques and procedures. As far as we know it Chaos Engineering is the only proactive mechanism for detecting availability and security incidents before they happen. We proactively introduce turbulent conditions, faults, and failures into our systems to determine the conditions by which our security will fail before it actually does.

In this session we will introduce a new concept known as Security Chaos Engineering and how it can be applied to create highly secure, performant, and resilient distributed systems.

About Aaron:

Aaron Rinehart has been expanding the possibilities of chaos engineering in its application to other safety-critical portions of the IT domain notably cybersecurity. He began pioneering the application of security in chaos engineering during his tenure as the Chief Security Architect at the largest private healthcare company in the world, UnitedHealth Group (UHG). While at UHG Rinehart released ChaoSlingr, one of the first open source software releases focused on using chaos engineering in cybersecurity to build more resilient systems. Rinehart recently founded a chaos engineering startup called Verica with Casey Rosenthal from Netflix and is a frequent author, consultant and speaker in the space.